What
we are is often occluded by the question of Who we are. Instructed
to become a Who, we rarely are offered the opportunity to explore
the What. The What is actually a rather frozen token. It is the
purported product of the knowing of distant experts, conveniently
deployed to save us precious time in experiential exploration. Such
conveniences too often hide a mimetic predator, pretending to be
something it is not in order to insure its own survival and elaboration.
Commonly these terrain-predators (which are literally ‘ways’
of making and relating conceptual understanding, akin to ‘species’
in animals) actively abhor our potential, and would, by their nature,
prefer to see it silenced — and replaced by agents and forms
of structure under their general and specific command.
o:O:o
The
foundations of our language and modes knowing are directly related
to the earliest elements of active problem-solving in our species.
If we can clearly glimpse each of these elements in their correct
sequence, seeing our cognitive history of origin in the correct
order — this activity will unlock knowledge-potentials that
will enable us to rescue each other and our world in ways we could
not have previously imagined possible.
There
are windows inside us that lead directly to our sources, and when
we touch these sources together, uniquely, there is no obstacle
we cannot rapidly overcome. The key is our agreement, and
our heartful pursuit together of the active connection, rather than
the tokenized versions we encounter as ‘ready-made’.
o:O:o
departures
Many of our religions, sciences and speculative philosophies are
consistently at work ‘making’ things. Almost all of
what they create is organized toward implying, asserting, guessing
and demanding the shapes we must conform to in terms of how we think
and act. Essentially, these are matters of connectivity.
These paragons of ‘knowledge’ have shaped the questions
and answers relating to who and what we are as a species, as individuals,
and as lifeForms. Most of their output represents human beings as
extremely special in terms of Life on Earth — indeed, we are
unique in many ways, and we might even be able to reasonably consider
ourselves somewhat of an ‘ascended’ species.
In general, we believe ourselves celestially or evolutionarily
ennobled— raised up to rule over, measure, and even define
reality. But in our feverish focus on our specialness and the stories
or justifications we attach to it we are defining ourselves to
ourselves. And what we believe to be liberation in these terrains
too often equates to its opposite.
Yes, we are unique. But what is it that we are a unique instance
of? God in animal, is one common answer. Evolutionary specialization
is another. In order to better understand the nature of what makes
us special, it is useful to remove this idea entirely, and decide
that we’re entirely unspecial.
o:O:o
The models we are offered are arbitrarily constrictive, in ways
we need to be able to see clearly before we can actively oppose
them. For every ‘gift’ or protection we may accept under
the auspices of civilization and its ways of knowing, there is a
strange and hidden price. Behind the systems and their champions
something is being eaten, digested, and converted to momentum. The
something is our humanity, and perhaps specifically our human connectivity.
There is something broken in our models of what we are, and none
of our ways of knowing, as a common people, are capable of assembling
the antidote. We cannot agree upon the problem due to its great
generality of scope and source, and the domains relevant to it are
circumscribed because they are the providence of experts instead
of common people. Somehow over the last 200 years the power of the
statistic — the dominance of models and theories in our lives
and experince — has become more important than living eyes,
hearts and minds.
Throughout even our
recent history, being human has ‘meant’ many different
things in different times and circumstances. Much if not most of
what we are, outside of being a uniquely charactered instance of
a biological template, is a matter of connectivity. Two
of the most significant connective momentums we will encounter as
animals are language, and its broodmate, culture. These will largely
define the character and activity of our conscious and active relation
with self, other, and universe. We will believe what we are shown,
in general — but we will also teach others to believe similarly,
and sustain and elaborate these beliefs at terrible cost to ourselves
and often our environment.
As a biological animal, our cognition is not appreciably different
from that of animals in general, with the exception of an apparently‘extra’
domain of representational potentials— one in which tokens
and connectivities remain in constant arisal and recombinant elaboration.
This is a simple matter to set up and complexify via the transports
of relation, and biological reflectivity.
Animals have something
vaguelu similar to our complexly represntational sentience, but
the human version is unique amongst Earth’s inhabitants —
or so we presume according to our ‘modern’ perspectives
and observations. This peculiar inward domain of reflective integration
and simulation offers us the potential to be different
from animals. Given the opportunity to explore and embody our potentials,
we can reduce the general outcome to two options, and the spectrum
between them.
We can become a superAnimal,
or we can become an antiAnimal. The nature and character of the
selection we actually embody is a result of how our inward and communal
gardens are organized, charactered, and elaborated as well as how
they are shared amongst us. It is not merely the presence of language,
and potentials for culture which magically levitate us above the
plain of animalian consciousness. It is also the specializations
of our planet as a whole, our environment, and our sentience. Not
our brain — but our whole organism, which in point of fact
is pretty much solid evolutionary ‘brain’ in many diverse
and connective forms.
If the inward potential for symbolic relation is not activated (or
perhaps amplified) through enlanguaging and enculturization, we
remain essentially animalian in our experience and character. Though
we cannot know what would happen to a group of humans who, as a
whole, had ‘lost’ languaging entirely — we can
imagine that a largely animalian sequence of events and relation
would play out — perhaps somewhat like what we might
observe amongst a tribe of gorillas. Our records of lost children,
or children who we discovered unenlanguaged and largely or completely
unsocialized are interesting — but they do not represent a
human in this state — they represent an anomaly.
The largest part of what we are is animalian (or perhaps cellular),
and this aspect of the animal we are shares an uneasy relationship
with a part of us it contains — the semantic animal we become
after being introduced to language, and the many refractory mirrors
of culture and experience.
What and who we are as human beings and societies largely emerges
in the contextual waters of our circumstances and connectivities.
Whatever my social and conceptual definition of human, self, or
myself may be — the reality it refers to will change considerably
in synchrony with my biocognitive status and relations of the moment.
Our circumstance is constantly changing — and the characters
of these changes create a powerful floating arbiter of
relation to any definition of human, self, or collective.
The form of our agreements, and their strength, is a general inspiration
for the characters and connectivities our tokens will imply, posit
or state — and thus enable us to pursue. When we choose or
agree to highlight the circumstance, for example, instead
of the subject — we see a radically different picture of relations,
value, qualities — and subjects. What was cast off in the
positive, is revealed in the negative. Yet something in our habits
of rationality resists such inversions. Perhaps the structure of
the species of rationality we preserve, elaborate and employ
requires this. If this is so, we must examine models that offer
both feature-sets for use in overlay or integration. Such a seemingly
small gesture could radically magnify what it means to sense, and
know.
Definitions will by
their nature structurally inform our experience and consciousness
of authority of every kind. Any definition implies relations with
its sources, or the holophores of which it is a metaphoric child.
These implications create pools of authority, and complex methods
of authorization and credentialing which function in almost all
of us invisibly, and without our permission or understanding. Under
one authority, being human requires the torture and execution of
others. Change the authority, rescue and nurturence become the orders
of the day. The spectrum of embodiments of this principle we suffer
and enjoy as a modern human being is startling. If we could watch
the human history with symbols and relations, as well as its effects
in the world and upon our species in a five-minute flash of information
it would be clear that we do not yet know what we are, and our efforts
to find out are often precariously poised at the edge of our own
erasure, much like those of a rebellious teenager seeking to escape
the confines of a cage so general that it cannot quite be defined
— for it is, in a sense, in everything.
At
the personal level, what we are by definition to ourselves is nebulous,
but it has anchors. The nature of these anchors are often clearly
revealed during crisis, stress, dreaming, creativity or surprise.
In each of these kinds of circumstance, the biocognitive animal
we are shifts gears, so to speak. We inhabit the living biocognitive
sources of what we are at all times. The pilot of the vehicle
changes, as does the flight-path, destination, and inspiration for
travel. The general tone of the circumstance will have much to say
about who climbs into the inner cockpit, or, if we prefer, who is
tending the inner gardens in which we exist to ourselves and find
our ability to act in accordance with personal and organismal intention.
If we generalize correctly, we can observe that metaphors and ideas
about self are revealed as the true children of their parent-holophores.
As children, they will inherit certain identity-characters from
the their parents’ properties. Tracing the lineage features
and root meaning-forms of our holophores is a practice that
allows us to glimpse the sources and events of poetic and real genesis
from which any given metaphor most likely arose. This grants us
access to the sentient gardens underneath them —
and on our world this is equivalent with having access to miraculously
powerful cognitive processes and potentials.
As an example, the metaphor ‘human’ asserts the identity
of its holophoric progenitors in all its future constructs and systems,
communications, activities, cognition, &c. Thus, if we are children
of God, God is the holophore within which the child-metaphor of
Human exists, and is thus a reflection of. If we are children of
Nature, the Earth is the holophore — as an object or system,
and as a sentient being or hyperstructure. This could be extended
to include perhaps the Solar System, Galaxy, or Universe.
If we are random accretions of a chemical clockwork-game, Science,
or perhaps biophysics in particular is the holophore. It is not
so much which token we select that defines us to ourselves, but
rather which meaning-characters of the parent token are most generously
rePresented in the specific form of the child we select. Whatever
inheritances we accrue from the precursor become a container for
our token, the way a world is a container for an animal.
The holophores we vaguely define and accept by our passive or active
agreement will in turn define the quality, liberty, potential and
survivability of our real existence as human beings on Earth —
and the quality and features of nurturence or predation experienced
in our personal and communal lives. The effect of the features of
our holophores is beyond the dramatic. Our choices embodied in the
accepted holophores for reality are the most significant choices
human beings can make — as individuals, groups of any
size, and a species. If we believe in the potentials of liberty,
knowledge, understanding and unity, we must not fail to locate their
sources. We must cease in our habits of reference to tokenized mimicry.
Any of our
holophores that cognitively enstage the unityBeing, Sentience, and
Organism vs Matter, and Time are the most important roots of our
symbolic cognitive potentials and experience. We will make fewer
errors with these holophores if their definitions follow
their sources rather than merely creating tokens or codicils about
it. These holophores must remain organic and experientially
connected to their sources.
When they don’t, a cognitively draconic feature
of our connectivity-basis awakens, and begins attacking everything
in sight. The resultant catastrophes have a sacred and secret aspect,
however, which is not obvious unless one is focusing on connectivity.
The purpose of this serpent is to modulate the general domains of
connectivity, such that they are recalibrated from source, or extinguished.
By ‘attacking’ the problem, this cognitive organism
causes the entire tableau to simplify — which in
turn should cause the misbehaving systems to seek their
source – and thus recalibrate. If not, well — as any
systems analyst knows — the recalcitrant elements are generally
recycled. This isn’t a law, but instead a very general aspect
offered as a figurative model.
In a living world, the signal that such a dragon is awake could
take many forms, for example, when myriads of tokens and machines
begin to transform a solar nursery into a techno-industrial graveyard.
With the holophores of Sentience, Time, the unityBeing, and Life
we must take great care — for in none of these domains do
any human experts exist. Even a group of human experts couldn’t
cut the mustard — especially if their expertise was primarily
academic in nature. What we must be attentively careful of is authorizing
knowledge over contact. Knowledge is frozen, tokenized,
and a rePresentation of something it refers to. Understanding, on
the other hand is reCognition of communication. We don’t want
to throw Knowledge away, but we definitely do not want
to be in any kind of position of servitude to it either. The holophores
we are born to explore are alive. There is no theory or codicil,
no expert or system of knowing that will contain them. We must learn
to entitle and empower each other to explore them directly, and
to uncredential not ourselves, but the tyrannical and deadly features
of systems of knowing that abhor our natures, our world, and our
cognitive and human potentials.
As a modern species, we have a long history of problems defining,
contacting or metaphying God, and all of the variously opposing
(and unified) positions are serious about their schemas in this
domain. In our prehistory, it is likely that there was no such token.
There certainly wasn’t one so general and essentially nondescript
until desacrilization created the potential to name the un-nameable
with a potentially objective label.
We are perhaps only now starting to reMember what the Earth means
as we struggle to awaken ourselves from the mechanized trend of
human and biological silencing we’re undergoing. Science and
‘technology’, appearing heroic, may well prove to indirectly
or perhaps even unintentionally comprise a planetary suicide-pill.
There is nothing standing in the way of the erasure of the biospheric
cogniscium, and it is happening faster than the extinction
of animalian life and anciently conserved ecosystems. The time for
us to act in unity is now. There will not be a later alike with
anything we can model. We must move before the crisis we’ve
created crests.
The implications of these holophoric progenitors of definition-value
are profound. In the next 20 years, they will likely play a major
role in determining whether or not thousands of billions of lifeYears
of terrestrial evolution is erased or supported. The tide, at the
moment, is vastly leaning toward erased. We are still struggling
to understand and embody our animalian relationship with language
and symbolic consciousness in a mode that empowers us, as a species
and individuals, to survive it. And unbeknownst to us, we are in
the earliest stages of this relationship, which we imagine, for
some reason, has been going on practically ‘forever’.
